Scientists have long doubted that Phoebe came from the same disk of material that formed Saturn and most of its moons. Phoebe has an unusual orbit that is inclined to Saturn’s equator, revolves backward with respect to both Saturn’s rotation and orbital motion, and travels in the opposite direction of Saturn’s other satellites.
Phoebe is widely believed to have wandered past Saturn and been captured by that planet’s mighty gravitational field. Where it wandered from was the question.
A University of Arizona astronomer and his collaborators are using a novel camera to hunt for extrasolar planets.
The project is being funded over the next five years by a $545,000 National Science Foundation award. NSF awarded the highly competitive Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant to Associate Professor Laird M. Close. The CAREER program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards for new faculty members. The CAREER program recognizes
For the past several years, a team of University of California astrophysicists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been using a cluster of roughly 300 computer processors to model some of the most intriguing aspects of the Universe. Called the Space Simulator, this de facto supercomputer has not only proven itself to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, but has also demonstrated that modeling and simulation of complex phenomena, from supernovae to cosmology, can be done on a
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed new evidence that extremely hot gas exists in a large region at the Milky Way’s center. The discovery came to light as a team of astronomers used Chandra’s unique resolving power to study a region about 100 light years across. The Marshall Center manages the Chandra program.
A long look by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed new evidence that extremely hot gas exists in a large region at the center of the Milky Way. The intensi
NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft carrying a $12.5 million University of Colorado at Boulder instrument package is expected to enter Saturn’s orbit June 30, beginning a four-year mission to probe the planet, its fabulous ring system and bizarre moons.
Launched Oct. 15, 1997 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the NASA spacecraft has traveled more than 2 billion miles during a roundabout, 6.7-year journey to the ringed planet. The most ambitious planetary mission ever, the $3 billion international proje
Project marks unique collaboration with NASA
NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite will reach a major milestone on Thursday, June 24, 2004 – the five-year anniversary of its launch atop a Delta-II rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The 18-foot tall, 3,000 pound satellite continues to operate from its perch nearly 500 miles above the Earth’s surface, gathering unique data about everything from planets and nearby stars to galaxies and quasars billi
In an article posted June 10 to the Astrophysical Journal Letters website, astrophysicists at Stanford report spotting a black hole so massive that it’s more than 10 billion times the mass of our sun. More important, this heavyweight is so far away that the scientists think it formed when the universe first began to light up with stars and galaxies, so it may provide a window into our cosmological origins.
’’In cosmology, it turns out that ’a galaxy a long time ago’ and ’far, far away’ re
A significant milestone in the development of ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission was reached last week when the contract to build the payload was signed between ESA and EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company)-CASA from Spain.
The contract, worth 62 million euros, was signed in Madrid, Spain on 11 June 2004 at the premises of the CDTI (Centre for Development of Industrial Technology). EADS-CASA now heads an industrial consortium of more than 20 companie
After a quiet, six-and-a-half-year, 2.2-billion-mile journey to Saturn aboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, the University of Chicago’s dust detector will soon begin its attempt to help unravel the mystery of the planet’s legendary rings one tiny particle at a time.
Cassini will become the first spacecraft ever to enter Saturn’s orbit at precisely 9:30 p.m. CDT June 30. NASA launched Cassini in October 1997. The University’s instrument, called the High Rate Detector, has quietly recorded spora
An international team of astronomers using the world’s biggest telescopes have directly measured the mass of an ultra-cool brown dwarf star and its companion dwarf star for the first time. Barely the size of the planet Jupiter, the dwarf star weighs in at just 8.5 percent of the mass of our Sun. This is the first ever mass measurement of a dwarf star belonging to a new stellar class of very low mass ultra-cool dwarf stars. The observation is a major step towards our understanding of the types of
Hottest body outside the sun
The hottest spot in the solar system is neither Mercury, Venus, nor St. Louis in the summer. Io, one of the four satellites that the Italian astronomer Galileo discovered orbiting Jupiter almost 400 years ago, takes that prize. The Voyager spacecraft discovered volcanic activity on Io over 20 years ago and subsequent observations show that Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The Galileo spacecraft, named in honor of the astronomer
This amazing high-resolution image of Phoebe’s pitted surface was taken very near the closest approach by the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens spacecraft.
It shows a crater with a diameter of 13 kilometres and a debris-covered floor. Part of another crater of similar size is visible at left, as is part of a larger crater at the top and many scattered smaller craters.
The radial streaks in the crater are due to downslope movements of loose fragments from impact ejecta (material thrown
Images collected during the Cassini-Huygens close fly-by of Saturn’s moon Phoebe give strong evidence that the tiny moon may be rich of ice and covered by a thin layer of darker material.
Its surface is heavily battered, with large and small craters. It might be an ancient remnant of the formation of the Solar System.
On Friday 11 June, at 21:56 CET, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft flew by Saturn’s outermost moon Phoebe, coming within approximately 2070 kilometres of the satell
An international team of astronomers, led by Hervé Bouy from the Max Planck Institute, Garching, Germany and the Observatoire de Grenoble, France, have for the first time measured the mass of an ultra-cool brown dwarf star. The team performed the measurements using four of the most powerful telescopes available. This is the first-ever mass measurement of an L-type star belonging to the new stellar class of very low-mass stars, discovered a few years ago. With a mass of 6.6% of the solar mass, this ce
Experimental verification would mean more spatial dimensions exist
According to string theory, all the different particles that constitute physical reality are made of the same thing–tiny looped strings whose different vibrations give rise to the different fundamental particles that make up everything we know. Whether this theory correctly portrays fundamental reality is one of the biggest questions facing physicists.
In the June on-line Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP)
These images of fluvial surface features at Mangala Valles on Mars were obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board the ESA Mars Express spacecraft.
The HRSC has imaged structures several times which are related to fluvial events in the past on Mars.
The region seen here is situated on the south-western Tharsis bulge and shows the mouth of the Mangala Valles and Minio Vallis outflow channels.
The source of the outflow channel is related to the Ma
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